The fire in the range spat and for a moment a deep cavern showed in the glowing coals like a mini hell. Before Ruby had left, he’d always imagined hell was like Father McHaffie described, a physical place of intense heat where you burned day and night with the smell of sulphur in your nostrils and nothing to soothe your scorching body, but he knew different now. Hell was worse than anything the priest could drum up to frighten his flock witless. It was knowing you had made a mistake there was no coming back from, a mistake that soured and coloured every single aspect of your life. That was the torturing part that had driven him mad, and although he’d excused himself at first by putting all the blame on Olive, he knew there had been a few moments on that New Year’s Eve when he could have stopped it happening. And Ruby had known it too. He would forever remember her face when he had told her, the look in her eyes.

But – and here his thinking became so painful that he screwed up his eyes against it for a second – there had been no sign of that terrible desolation when he had met her in the street a few weeks ago. She had changed. He knew everyone said he had too – his mam certainly was one for calling a spade a spade – but Ruby had changed in a different way. Deep inside he knew he was still the same, even though because of self-survival he’d put on a tough front the last years, but as he’d stared into Ruby’s face he had known she wasn’t the same person he had loved so passionately. Even the way she had been with him – understanding, gentle even – had told him the feeling she’d had for him was dead, and the old Ruby, the girl who tormented his dreams, was no more. He would have welcomed bitterness, anger, accusations from her rather than the kindness. He’d stood there in his work clothes looking at this creature from another lifetime who had transformed into someone who could have been from the upper classes, and he’d felt sick to the soul of him.

Looking at his wife, he said quietly, ‘I saw Ruby before she went back to Newcastle.’ He hadn’t meant to ever mention it and he had no idea why he had.

‘I thought you might have done.’

The words sounded calmly indifferent and if he hadn’t seen the way her face had tightened he would have thought she was unconcerned. Even more quietly, he muttered, ‘She’s different. Not just in the way she dresses and speaks, I mean, but she’s different. Did you think that when you talked to her? That she’s changed?’

‘No one stays the same. She’s a woman now – she was a girl when she left here.’